Stochastic Image Transmission with CoAP for Extreme Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces a stochastic image transmission method using CoAP over UDP designed for extreme environments like underwater, enabling approximate real-time image transfer without retransmissions despite high latency and error rates.

Contribution

It proposes a novel stochastic block-based image transmission scheme with CoAP, reducing latency and avoiding retransmissions in noisy, high-latency networks.

Findings

Successful implementation on Raspberry Pi 4

Achieved approximate real-time image transmission

Demonstrated robustness in high-error environments

Abstract

Communication in extreme environments is an important research topic for various use cases including environmental monitoring. A typical example is underwater acoustic communication for 6G mobile networks. The major challenges in such environments are extremely high-latency and high-error rate. They make real-time image transmission difficult using existing communication protocols. This is partly because frequent retransmission in noisy networks increases latency and leads to serious deterioration of real-timeness. To address this problem, this paper proposes a stochastic image transmission with Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) for extreme environments. The goal of the proposed idea is to achieve approximate real-time image transmission without retransmission using CoAP over UDP. To this end, an image is divided into blocks, and value is assigned for each block based on the requirement. By the stochastic transmission of blocks, the reception probability is guaranteed without retransmission even when packets are lost in networks. We implemented the proposed scheme using Raspberry Pi 4 to demonstrate the feasibility. The performance of the proposed image transmission was confirmed from the experimental results.